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Now: given a light of this degree, remaining in the upper
sphere at its appointed station, pure light in purest place, what
mode of outflow from it can be conceived possible?
Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow downwards of its own
accord; and there exists in those regions no power to force it
down. Again, body in contact with soul must always be very
different from body left to itself; the bodily substance of the
heavens has that contact and will show that difference.
Besides, the corporeal substance nearest to the heavens would be
air or fire: air has no destructive quality; fire would be
powerless there since it could not enter into effective contact:
in its very rush it would change before its attack could be felt;
and, apart from that, it is of the lesser order, no match for
what it would be opposing in those higher regions.
Again, fire acts by imparting heat: now it cannot be the source
of heat to what is already hot by nature; and anything it is to
destroy must as a first condition be heated by it, must be
brought to a pitch of heat fatal to the nature concerned.
In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to the heavens to
ensure their permanence- or to produce their circular movement,
for it has never been shown that their natural path would be the
straight line; on the contrary the heavens, by their nature, will
either be motionless or move by circle; all other movement
indicates outside compulsion. We cannot think, therefore, that
the heavenly bodies stand in need of replenishment; we must not
argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose
sustaining soul is not the same, whose space is not the same,
whose conditions are not those which make restoration necessary
in this realm of composite bodies always in flux: we must
recognise that the changes that take place in bodies here
represent a slipping-away from the being [a phenomenon not
incident to the celestial sphere] and take place at the dictate
of a Principle not dwelling in the higher regions, one not
powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in
which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in
its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind,
and, as we have shown, cannot at every point possess the
unchangeable identity of the Intellectual Realm.
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